Jonathan Blow's presentation

[Ethan Watson via Digitalmars-d]

On Monday, 8 May 2017 at 19:14:16 UTC, Meta wrote:
> Is this why most console games that get ported to PC are 
> massive? GTA V on PC, for example, was 100GB, while Skyrim was 
> around 8GB.

Consoles have a fixed hardware level that will give you 
essentially deterministic performance. The quality of assets it 
can handle are generally 1/4 to 1/2 as detailed as what the 
current top-line but reasonably-priced PC hardware can handle. 
And PC gamers *love* getting the higher detailed assets. So we 
ship PC games with the option to scale the quality of the assets 
used at runtime, and ship with higher quality assets than is 
required for a console game.

See as an alternative example: the Shadows of Mordor ultra HD 
texture pack, which requires a 6GB video card and an additional 
download. Another example I like using is Rage, which is 
essentially 20GB of unique texture data. If they wanted to 
re-release it on Xbox One and PS4 without being accused of just 
dumping a port across, they'd want to ship with 80GB of texture 
data.

There's also grumblings about whether those HD packs are worth 
it, but now that 4K displays are coming in those grumblings are 
stopping as soon as people see the results.

On Tuesday, 9 May 2017 at 02:21:19 UTC, Nick Sabalausky 
(Abscissa) wrote:
> I don't know anything about Witcher, but FF13 *does* have a 
> fair amount of pre-rendered video, FWIW. And maybe Witcher uses 
> better compression than FF13?

Correct about the video. The Final Fantasy games are notorious 
for their pre-renders and their lengthy cutscenes. All of which 
require massive amounts of video and audio data.

Better compression though? Unlikely. Texture formats are fairly 
standardised these days. Mesh formats are custom, but not as much 
of a space hog as textures. Other assets like audio and video is 
more where the compression formats come in to play. But gaming 
hardware has a few tricks for that. For example:

On Tuesday, 9 May 2017 at 02:13:19 UTC, Nick Sabalausky 
(Abscissa) wrote:
> Uncompressed? Seriously? I assume that really means FLAC or 
> something rather than truly uncompressed, but even 
> still...sounds more like a bullet-list 
> pandering^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hselling point to the same 
> suckers^H^H^H^H^H^H^H"classy folk" who buy Monster-brand cables 
> for digital signals than a legit quality enhancement.

Well, no. Gaming consoles - and even mobile devices - have 
dedicated hardware for decompressing some common audio and video 
formats. PC hardware does not. Decompression needs to happen on 
the CPU.

Take Titanfall as a use case, which copped quite a bit of flack 
for shipping the PC version with uncompressed audio. The Xbox One 
version shipped on a machine that guaranteed six hardware threads 
(at one per core) with dedicated hardware for audio 
decompression. Their PC minspec though? A dual core machine (at 
one thread per core) with less RAM and only using general purpose 
hardware.

The PC scene had a cry, but it was yet another case of PC gamers 
not actually understanding hardware fully. The PC market isn't 
all high-end users, the majority of players aren't running 
bleeding edge hardware. They made the right business decision to 
target hardware that low, but it meant some compromises had to be 
made. In this case, the cost of decompressing audio on the CPU 
was either unfeasible in real time or increased load times 
dramatically during load times. Loading uncompressed audio off 
the disk was legitimately an optimisation in both cases.

On Tuesday, 9 May 2017 at 06:50:18 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad wrote:
> It isn't all that hard to distinguish if you know what to 
> listen for. I hear a big difference in music I have mixed 
> down/mastered on a good headset.

So, as Walter would say, "It's trivially obvious to the casual 
observer."

That's the point of the blind test. It isn't trivially obvious to 
the casual observer. You might think it is, but you're not a 
casual observer. That's essentially why LAME started up - a bunch 
of audiophiles decided to encode for perception of quality rather 
than strictly objective quality.